My affection for the weekday bicycle commute is inversely proportional to the grade of the next hill. Don’t get me wrong, I find cycling for sake of cycling — putting on the stretchy racing bibs and clicky shoes to go tackle endless climbs — a pure joy. But when the ride into the office requires a shower and wardrobe change, my laziness and vanity usually win out, so I end up just taking the bus.

Electric bikes seem like a brilliant solution, as they can help you zip up hills and across flats without all the huffing and puffing. But the e-bike has proven a tough nut to crack, as evidenced by the dearth of electric bicycles that are practical in all the important ways: appropriate power, easy and fast charging, intuitive controls, manageable weight and supreme comfort in the saddle. Some come close, but then fail on aesthetics — nobody wants to be seen on something that resembles a Huffy with a giant silver box welded to the back of the frame.

The motor and battery are almost entirely invisible at first glance, hidden away inside the frame.

The designers of the Faraday Porteur have nailed the elusive important bits by prioritizing the e-bike’s bicycle-ness. The motor and battery are almost entirely invisible at first glance, hidden away inside the frame. And actually, the electric power boost is a secondary feature that, rightfully, stays dormant until topographic desperation makes you hit the switch. Until then, it’s a comfortable cruiser that looks like it was pulled straight from a rack on Amsterdam’s hippest street corner.

The Porteur is the result of an award-winning design from the Oregon Manifest, a competition that challenged builders to create the ultimate utility bike. Adam Vollmer, an IDEO designer and alum of Stanford and MIT, led a team that spent months tweaking the design until the entire package fit into a beautiful retro cruiser. Now, they’ve got a Kickstarter campaign, and the team is taking pre-orders for bikes at $3,500 a pop. Yes, that’s expensive, but people are willing to pay: The funding round ends on Aug. 9, and the team is already well past its $100,000 goal — $141,000 as of this writing.

Before even considering the motor, it’s a fancy ride. A Brooks B17 saddle is standard. The front platform for hauling cargo is interchangeable, and the support for it is mounted to the frame instead of the handlebars, which makes for easier turning under load. A Swiss-made scissor kickstand folds down from the bottom bracket, and lightweight bamboo fenders keep water off your ass. The brakes are Avid mechanical disks, and the transmission is an eight-speed Shimano Alfine internally geared hub, so there’s no derailleur to get gummed up by sand, gravel, or road slush.

The electronics are deliberately hidden from sight. Filling the cavities in the dual top tubes is a 110Wh battery array with a claimed lifespan of about five years. It powers a 250-watt motor located in the front wheel — it’s designed to operate as a two-wheel-drive system, meaning your quads power the back wheel.

A cigarette-pack-sized, weatherproof collection of chips and wires tucked under the seat serves as the brains of the drivetrain. After measuring the pedal speed and wheel speed with magnetic sensors, the system calculates how much boost to give. The engineer who designed it accounted for every thread of wire inside, ensuring that, unlike the clunky power units you see on other motorized bikes, the electric power remains hidden. It’s a feat of streamlined design.

At first, you feel the motor only a little bit, then the power starts to increase smoothly. Even starting from a standstill, the boost gets you up to top speed with hardly any effort.

To feel the electricity in action, flick the thumb switch on the left grip to turn on the “pedal assist.” Once initiated, the bike begins to feel weightless, like you’re being pushed by a strong tailwind. But you have to keep pedaling. The idea is to provide a supplementary boost in the face of an incline. You still have to pedal, but the boost makes a huge difference. At first, you feel the motor only a little bit, then the power starts to increase smoothly. Even starting from a standstill, the boost gets you up to top speed with hardly any effort. It’s damn hard to keep from grinning.

The electric drive system does have a weird glitch. It only happens when you significantly increase the amount of torque you’re putting into pedals — like when you get up out of the saddle at the beginning of a steep hill. When you do this with the power boost on, you get these brief, intermittent gaps in pedal resistance. You’re pushing really hard, and then the resistance disappears and the pedals spin freely for a split second (a feeling akin to when you miss the last step on a staircase and your foot just drops). Then you get resistance again, then another sudden drop, then resistance.

Most of the time, the power creeps in smoothly and there are no glitches. So if you’re a get-up-and-grind type of rider, this odd resistance drop requires you to recalibrate your riding style — when you’re starting a hill, you just need to find the correct gear and cadence to continue pedaling smoothly, rather than resorting to standing up out of the saddle. There’s a trick to it, but I wasn’t able to master it by the end of my hour-long test ride around downtown Palo Alto.

It is clear the designers haven’t stopped at the novelty of an electric motor, and have instead built a bike that’s primarily a convenient and comfortable utility machine. After a 45-minute charge from a standard outlet, the batteries will give you about 10 to 15 miles of power, more if you turn the assist off while coasting. That’s plenty for city rides. When darkness falls, the hidden light sensors turn on the integrated rear LED and the twin one-watt LEDs in the front, which are exceptionally bright and, unlike accessory lighting, really hard to steal. If your trip to the farmers market requires a subway ride to get home, the Porteur weighs in at just under 40 pounds, which means you can haul it up and down stairs without too much struggle.

After a 45-minute charge from a standard outlet, the batteries will give you about 10 to 15 miles of power.

The bike comes with two leather-wrapped charging cords, and a leather pouch on the top tube for your leather-encased iPhone and vintage leather wallet.

If you went to the Kickstarter page and ordered a Porteur right now, you’d pay $3,500. When the bikes are delivered in mid-2013, they will sell to new customers at retail for $3,800, a $300 bump. For the amount of electronic inventiveness and quality materials integrated into this gorgeous package, the $3,800 price feels about right. But of course, the value depends equally on the gnarliness of your town’s topography and how you see a bicycle fitting into your life.

This electric motor, to me, solves the issues that dissuade me from bicycling around San Francisco. I live at the top of a steep hill and I sweat easily. I usually arrive at Wired with my shirt stuck to my back. I might be exceptionally thin-skinned, but those inconveniences are what keep me from making use of the city’s abundant bike lanes, and getting a pleasant bit of exercise in the morning. The Porteur makes the bicycle a more realistic method of transportation for me.

One final note: If the Kickstarter backing reaches $300,000, Faraday will develop an app that, via Bluetooth connectivity, lets users adjust the pedal assist according to their riding strength and the difficulty of their commute. That funding level seems unlikely with only a week left, but it’s something to look forward to eventually if you’re already a backer.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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